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Handbook of Collective Robotics - Fundamentals and Challenges

Collective robotics is young and promising research field, where many robots work as one team, group or swarm to achieve a common goal. Collective systems provide several essential advantages such as extended reliability, scalability, flexibility and reconfigurability, capabilities for emergent and self-organizing phenomena. Depending on size, complexity and underlying principles of interaction and information transfer, there are different small-, middle- and large-scale systems, denoted as cooperative, networked, swarm and nano-robotics. All these systems utilize different mechanisms of perception, coordination and learning. Lately, research on swarm, reconfigurable and evolutionary robotics leaded to an appearance of morphogenetic systems, so-called artificial organisms, with advanced homeostatic and adaptive functionality. Collective systems became attractive for different underwater, aerial and industrial applications as well as for new areas of nano- and biological (bacterial) robotics. This book describes basic principles underlying collective systems, discusses such issues as design of emergence, fault tolerance, self-properties, artificial evolution, appearance of robot cultures and indicates main application areas.

This book is devoted to mechatronic, chemical, bacteriological, biological, and hybrid systems, utilizing cooperative, networked, swarm, self-organizing, evolutionary and bio-inspired design principles and targeting underwater, ground, air, and space applications. It addresses issues such as open-ended evolution, self-replication, self-development, reliability, scalability, energy foraging, adaptivity, and artificial sociality. The book has been prepared by 52 authors from world-leading research groups in 14 countries. This book covers not only current but also future key technologies and is aimed at anyone who is interested in learning more about collective robotics and how it might affect our society.